Children: Values, Priorities

What is the matter with people? They delegate their children to the care of others because they feel their own time is too valuable to be wasted looking after their own.

Perhaps instead of relegating children to second-place importance in their lives they might be more advantaged and so would their children, having their parents more present in their lives. The problem is one of economics. Not so much that a traditional two-parent family struggles to get by on one salary, but that on that one salary it becomes a struggle to live in the manner they have accustomed themselves to.

The children are given over to the care of licensed, and unlicensed day-care-givers. Parents entrusting the well-being and welfare of their responsibilities to others. Largely strangers who have undertaken to open a family business. And who likely do a fairly good job of it in the process. But there remains a huge gap in the lives of these children.

When people undertake to present as 'professionals' - which they are, when they are paid to produce a service - they are practical and detached, not emotionally involved. That deep emotional attachment to a child, assuring the child that someone very close is involved because of love, and who offers emotional support and stimulation and encouragement is absent.

How positive is that for a child's development? Add to that the failures inherent in the process when day-care providers are occasionally charged with abuse, and innumerable other instances where too many children are taken into private day-care for a single attendant to properly and adequately supervise them; a failed and flawed process ensues.

These are the same parents who, to 'compensate' for their absence in their children's daily lives, speak of 'quality' family time. When the focus, in brief evening-together times is 'being together'. The very same parents who spend a fortune in buying expensive toys and electronic games and cellphones and computers and televisions and motorized bicycles and ATVs for their children.
Parents cannot possibly be ignorant of these anomalous lapses into quasi-parenthood.

Nor are they unaware of the risks involved in having others care for their children, people whom they beg to take on their child, even though there are already too many in that establishment for the number of supervisors. But they prefer to overlook the inconvenient facts. Or to look for alternate day care, or to commit themselves to their own children's welfare.

And then there are those dreadful instances where a child-care provider's attention is distracted from the vital need to watch a very young child, and the worst possible scenario results.

Backyard pools and young children make for a lethal mix. And irrespective of how careful child-minders are in the proximity of pools, including those which have the requisite safety features of fencing and self-closing gates, the potential for disaster remains. Children are determined, fearless and curious, and the need to watch and guide them constantly is too great to be compromised.

Five minutes' attention otherwise engaged than on routinely and automatically checking the whereabouts of a toddler is all that is required to allow that child sufficient time to accident himself out of existence. Which is precisely what occurred at an east-end Ottawa private day care when a number of adult supervisors were assembled, along with 22 children and a 2-year-old toddled into an above-ground pool.

Society's values and priorities have become sadly skewed. The tragedy of yet another child death might be inevitable in the greater scheme of things; even young children entrusted to their own parents' and grandparents' care sometimes meet the same sad end. But we can weight things more favourably toward a child's welfare.

Yet personally selfish and deliberately oblivious 'needs' dictate otherwise.